Reliability design of laminated plate for buckling

This paper describes the structural reliability analysis and design of the symmetric laminated plate subject to buckling load. The material constants and the orientation angle of each layer as well as applied load are considered as the independent random variables. Since the buckling load is determined by the minimum eigenvalue of all the eigen modes, the buckling failure event can be modeled as the series system consisting of each potential eigen mode. When the design point obtained by FORM is the unsymmetric laminate, another point corresponding to the reversed lamination sequence also becomes the design point since the two laminated plates have the same structural property. The failure probability bounds of the series system are evaluated by Ditlevsen's bounds. investigated are the effects of unsymmetric laminate introduced by the random variation of the basic variables and the series system modeling on the reliability index. Finally, the reliability-maximized design is compared to the deterministic buckling-load-maximized design.